This paper will examine Rifat Chadirji’s Abu Dhabi National Theatre as a lens through which to explore the city’s transformation, from the formative first decade of the United Arab Emirates to the present. Tracing the theatre’s development between 1971 and 1981, it will situate the building within Abu Dhabi’s emergence as a modern capital and the nation’s political, economic, cultural, and architectural development.

The paper will place this history against regional and international geopolitical developments, including the 1973 Yom Kippur War and subsequent oil crisis, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution, and the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War. It will then follow the theatre’s afterlife, examining its changing place in the city’s cultural landscape and the circumstances that have shaped its present condition as a less frequently used venue.

Drawing on archival fragments, fieldwork, and analogue photography, the paper will combine historical research with slow observation and embodied encounters. By connecting the story of the theatre’s conception and construction to its subsequent uses, it will consider how the building registers changing ambitions for modernity, cultural life, and public space in Abu Dhabi.

Thise paper examines how the opportunity to showcase a design project through the exhibition Al Khor Urban Futures within the Doha Design 2026 Biennale was turned into the occasion to publicly announce an urban regeneration initiative for the second largest municipality in Qatar, Al Khor. What happens when the actual objective of an urban regeneration scheme extends beyond physical transformation to the creation of a particular community consensus, and to the community's participation in the shaping and financing of such an initiative? In the exhibition any given design is presented as speculation rather than final form, strategically encouraging the public to join the process to understand - and increasingly defend - the social, economic, institutional and design choices that lead to it.

Rather than using the exhibition to solely present an urban and architectural design, the approach was reversed: the process itself and the people involved in it became the subjects of the exhibition. And this was spatialised through the establishment of a Living Archive, encouraging people to contribute artefacts, ideas, feedback, historical materials in a physical space but also through a digital website, and a long-term 'majilis' (a community 'sitting room') within the space allocated to temporary exhibition.The exhibition therefore becomes part of the regeneration process itself: a space in which possible futures can be made visible, discussed and negotiated, and through which the conditions for the actual community participation can begin to be established.

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In May 2025, activists prevented the drilling of a borehole for a proposed wind farm near Sitia, Eastern Crete, that would have pierced two key aquifers. As part of a wider hybrid energy project, the proposed 20/150 kV substation would transmit power to a hydroelectric dam to the west, near Rethymno. In August 2026, Greece revised its spatial framework for renewable energy infrastructure, prohibiting development near points of water abstraction for human consumption. Nevertheless, a turbine outside a protection zone would still stand on the karst, where precipitation, aquifer, cave, and spring form a single hydro-geo-cultural volume.

Contradictory state and EU policies govern Crete. The Green Deal mandates renewable capacity, whilst bailout-era conditions pressed Greece towards privatisation and extraction. EU regulation dictates how a landscape should be assessed for interconnected environmental risks, and the Water Framework Directive is intended to protect the same aquifer that the special spatial planning framework leaves exposed. Tensions emerge in the gaps between these technical domains.

Residents recount that the only true maps of water on Crete are military in origin. German hydrogeological maps produced during the Second World War treated water as a matter of occupation. Yet women’s domestic labour at springs went unseen by Axis surveillance, allowing this invisibility to support the Andartes partisans. Similarly, tales of water nymphs, or neraides, were used to spatialise underground flows, crafting a hydrogeological vernacular that resisted full legibility and offered protection.

This paper traces how different techniques of knowing water have been crafted in the service of both privatisation and the commons, investigating claims over a contested environment. It examines artefacts, maps, and drawings to ask how knowledge can become legible enough to inform environmental governance and mobilise political action, whilst remaining accountable to the community whose water is at stake.

This paper begins with recent news of the fire at the Kehlsteinhaus, better known as the Eagle’s Nest, on 23 October 2026, and the ensuing debate over its reconstruction. Built in 1938 for Adolf Hitler, the teahouse survived the war and opened as a mountain restaurant in 1952. Its appearance in an American serviceman’s photograph connects this contemporary event to the paper’s broader examination of the spatial and visual legacies of the US military presence in Bavaria.

The paper forms part of a larger thesis organised into three parts, which aims to trace the connections between photography, military architecture, agricultural landscapes and proposed data centres. The first part examines American photography and the experience of being stationed in “enemy land”, asking how images documented military life while framing encounters with German territory, civilians and the aftermath of war. The photograph of the Kehlsteinhaus links these historical representations to contemporary reporting and disputes over the building’s future. The second Part investigates American barracks and the signs through which military authority became visible, and examines how military up until the mid 1990s installations intersected with surrounding farmland, cultivation practices and rural spatial organisation.

The third considers proposals to convert former military sites into data centres amid debates over US military withdrawal and NATO commitments. It examines demands on land, water and energy alongside media coverage and Bavarian and federal regulatory debates.

This paper examines how digital visibility translates into control over urban space through two sites in Naples’ Quartieri Spagnoli: Maradona’s mural and Óscar Tusquets’ Toledo metro station. Following Maradona’s death in 2020, the mural became a secular shrine, while the station circulated internationally as an architectural spectacle. Together, their mediated images have helped recast a historically stigmatised neighbourhood as a tourist destination.

Drawing on photographs, videos, online narratives, and municipal documents, the paper traces the relationship between cultural recognition, tourism, and the commercialisation of residential space. It focuses on two episodes: the closure of Largo Maradona in October 2025, following police seizures affecting local businesses, and the council’s approval of its redevelopment in January 2026. These events expose tensions between informal custodianship, private ownership, public access, and municipal regulation.

By examining the mural’s transition from neighbourhood memorial to managed attraction alongside Toledo station’s role as an infrastructural and symbolic gateway, the paper asks who controls and benefits from the neighbourhood’s increasingly marketable image. It argues that digital narratives do more than represent urban transformation: they help organise visitor flows, legitimise interventions, and reshape claims to place, revealing how local pride and cultural recognition become entangled with the restructuring of neighbourhood life.

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Between 1966 and 1969 Charles and Ray Eames and the Eames Office worked with Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Associates (KRJDA) to design a new national aquarium in Washington D.C. Although unrealised, the National Fisheries Center and Aquarium project epitomised the Eames Office’s action-research approach by integrating science research, audience-centred museology, pedagogical thinking, architecture and design. With the stated goal of encouraging people to preserve and protect the environment through a greater understanding of the ‘delicate balance of natural ecology’ and its conservation, the project represents both a broad shift in public consciousness about the precarity of ecosystems and environmental destruction, as well as a more sharply articulated set of values driving work in the Eames Office in the 1960s and 70s.

This work in progress presentation will draw on recent archival research into the origin, conceptual development and architectural plans for the Aquarium through surviving project documentation, drawings and model photography. It will focus on the uses of biophilic connection and action research through image making at the Eames Office as a way of developing the project’s curatorial ideas and spatial experience. By analysing key archival evidence the presentation unearths this little known aspect of Eames history to build an alternative reading of Eames Office practice, moving beyond iconic design objects towards an understanding of design as research, curation and ecological inquiry.